


Bucky Tries to Kill Three Times

by wallflowerdalek



Series: Bucky Barnes, Third Wheel [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky doesn't know how to people, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 09:52:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1546523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallflowerdalek/pseuds/wallflowerdalek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky lives in an attic, trying to figure out how to exist. He is confused by David Bowie, and also by feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bucky Tries to Kill Three Times

The first time Bucky tries to kill them, it is with a kitchen knife.

Bucky discounts all of the times before he left Hydra, of course. For one, Bucky wasn’t Bucky, he was the Winter Soldier. For another, he is pretty sure he wasn’t actually trying to kill them those times.

He is alone in the kitchen, and he hasn’t slept in a few days. This in itself isn’t unusual, but he is getting less good at it. His body is tired—he feels pain in a way he had forgotten was possible, in a mediocre way. In a nagging, dull, tired way.

He opens the refrigerator and is overwhelmed by it. There is too much, the lights are too bright, and everything is too clean. The gleam of white reminds him of lab coats and bones.

He shuts the door, finds his energy bars in a cupboard. As he is reaching up, feeling the stiffness in his arm stretch out, he hears the tiniest noise.

The kitchen knife is in his metal hand before he even understands that it’s there, and he’s whirled around with it out, kill or be hurt again, and he means to kill before—        

Steve’s bare abs have flexed and he jumps back with. Still, a thin frown of blood wells up where the dull knife grazed him. His face registers the kind of good-natured surprise that only Steve can manage after Bucky has tried to liberate his intestines.

The knife is out of Bucky’s hand just as fast, clattering on the floor. It might’ve hit his foot. He doesn’t care.

“You okay, Buck?”

A noise comes from Bucky’s mouth that he doesn’t even have control of, and he follows the knife to the floor. Bucky closes his eyes to the sight of Sam, just in the kitchen, examining the cut. He opens them again when he smells the antiseptic cream and the strange scent of band aids. He watches Sam crouch, kiss the top of the band aids with a tiny little dimpled smile. Steve laughs.

“Look, I know you’ll heal soon, but I don’t want you bleeding all over my house.”

Steve pulls him up, puts a hand firmly behind his head, and kisses him deeply. “I appreciate your concern.”

Bucky pulls himself off the ground. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Steve shakes his head. “Don’t mention it.”

“It’s not uncommon for—” Sam, ever the VA councilor, starts, and then stops. He’s tried before, he’ll try again. Bucky isn’t ready for that. He sees Steve and Sam’s hands find each other, without looking, as if attracted by magnets.

“I’m tired,” Bucky says, and heads off to his room. It’s the attic, barely big enough for him to stand in, barely big enough for his bed and space for him to undress. After so many years in a HYDRA prison cell, he finds he can’t sleep in bigger rooms. Outside, sure. But not well.

When he wakes up, the knives are all gone. It’s not like he cooks, so he’s never needed them, and it’s probably better this way. Still, the bare square of counter where the wooden knife-block used to sit eats at him.

 

“Morning, Bucky,” Sam says pleasantly, over a cup of coffee. “How are you feeling?”

Bucky shakes his head and gets a glass of tap water.

They keep asking him that. _How are you? How are you feeling? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?_

Bucky doesn’t know what feelings are. He doesn’t know. He guesses he must feel, that the twisting snakes in his stomach are a feeling. That maybe the way he wishes he could sleep and never stop is a feeling. That some of the endless creeping thoughts that fill his head like flies on a corpse might be distilled into feelings.

But Bucky can’t grab on to anything long enough to answer those questions.

_Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?_

 

Sam and Steve are good at talking about feelings. Sometimes Bucky wakes up and hears them talking. Not sex—he hears that plenty, but this is different. Talking. Laughing. More-intimate-than-sex-talking.

He never took Steve for a fairy. He doesn’t want it to be a problem, not now, not when he’s just gotten him back. And he gets them impression that fairies are okay now. It just…confuses him.

They’re eating dinner—meat—and Bucky has a slice on his fork, takes a bite. Juice runs down his chin. He likes meat.

His mouth is full of food. “So what about Peggy?”

Steve has just bitten into a vegetable, and he starts coughing. Sam pounds him on the back, hands him water, and then, when he’s mostly recovered, grabs onto his wineglass like it might run away otherwise.

“What about Peggy?” Steve says weakly, once he can speak again.

“I mean. Was she just convenient? Were you just hiding?”

Sam drains his wine glass. Steve rubs at his stubble.

“Bucky. I love Peggy.”

“—but you’re a fairy.”

Sam snorts laughter. “No man, I’m the one with wings.”

“The word these days is ‘gay,’ Buck,” Steve runs a hand through his stupid perfect hair. “And I’m not gay. I’m bi.”

“By what?”

Sam is covering his face now, laughing hard.

“Bisexual. It means I like who I like, regardless of their gender.”

Bucky squints. “Okay. That’s a pretty fancy word for a kid from the lower east side.”

Steve grins, shrugs. “Man, the future is pretty fancy.”

Sam’s shoulders are shaking with his mirth. Steve pats him on the back, and goes back to eating.

 

The second time Bucky tries to kill them, he’s having a nightmare. They’re testing him again, and he rips out of the bindings they’ve tied him down with, and he starts killing everyone.

And once he’s finally woken up he realizes that Sam is laying against the wall, dazed, and Steve is holding him, and his metal fingers are flexing open and closed, almost of their own accord. And for one, brief moment—

“He’s fine Bucky, he’s fine. Just got the wind knocked out of him.”

“Shoulda known better—” Sam wheezes.

After that, Bucky puts his bed over the hatch that opens into his attic so they can’t get in.

 

Sam leaves for the VA sometimes—Bucky doesn’t notice time, but he would guess it’s at the same time every week. He meets “friends.”

Steve leaves too. Sometimes he goes to meet people. He never says who.

And they run together in the morning, coming back sweaty and breathless and laughing. Bucky wishes they would invite him to run, but they never do.

Steve is alone in the living room, listening to music, while Sam is gone meeting friends. He is drawing.

Bucky ghosts at the edge of the doorway for most of the album, shifting from one foot to the other, flexing his fingers.

“ _Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were Voodoo/The kids were just crass/He was the naz/With God given ass._ ”

Finally Steve pauses in his sketching.

“What does that even mean?” Bucky sounds like an impatient child, and he knows it, and he does not care.

“Got me,” Steve said. “This was Tony’s idea.”

Tony is Steve’s friend. Steve won’t let him come over. He says Bucky’s not ready for him, and Bucky has heard him on the phone, asking to look at Bucky’s metal arm.

“Did you ever—uh—with me?”

“ _I gotta straighten my face/This mellow thigh chick/Just put my spine out of place._ ”

Steve’s got his grumpy face on. “Bucky. I wouldn’t. I’m a gentleman, Bucky.”

“I don’t mean. Look, did you want…”

Steve goes from grumpy to red, and that probably was an answer right there. Embarrassed Steve reminds Bucky of things he hasn’t remembered in a long time, Steve before he was the Captain, Steve when he was tiny and young, flashes of insight that Bucky isn’t ready for, and he holds his head against the onslaught as Steve searches for words.

“I don’t know Buck. I can’t—I’m not going to lie to you and say the thought didn’t cross my mind. More than once. But—it was you and me against the world, Buck. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

He drops the sketchbook on the couch and stands up, paces.

The metal hand is cool, and he uses it like an icepack on the back of his neck.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Bucky’s voice is hoarse, and he tries to remember what it was to be a ghost.

 

The third time Bucky tries to kill them, he is wide awake, and no one else is.

The sounds of two snoring men come from the bedroom Steve and Sam share. Bucky looks in the door, sees four feet—two light, two dark—twisted together like steel cable, like tree roots, like they have grown together like this and will not come apart.

Steve and Sam have a lot of sex, late at night. They talk a lot during sex—Bucky doesn’t remember much about sex but he doesn’t remember talking like that, doesn’t remember all of those questions—and he doesn’t remember being so happy, either. Really, Bucky doesn’t remember being happy much. He keeps waiting for the happy memories to show up, and they never do.

But Sam and Steve are happy, ridiculous happy, happier than anyone could believe.

He has seen Sam do this a hundred times, and Steve too. After he sees their sleeping feet, Bucky decides to make coffee.

He puts the kettle on first. Sam has a French press, and it looks easy to use. Except by the time Bucky finds the beans and the grinder, the water is already boiling. So he takes the kettle off, and turns off the burner. And then he grinds the beans, and then he puts the kettle back on. And then he stands around and waits for it to sing again.

It seems like it takes a long time, but Bucky hasn’t made coffee in most of a century. He is disappointed when Sam and Steve are up before the coffee is even steeping.

“Does something smell like gas?” Sam asks.

“I was making coffee,” Bucky says.

“Open the windows,” Steve says, and there is a frenzy of window-opening and leaving the house to stand out in the back yard, and Sam and Steve are laughing, good-naturedly.

When Bucky finally realizes that he never lit the gas, he starts crying. It is the first time it has happened since—since—he can’t remember. But it was a long time ago. And it feels like spring.

 

“You’ll be fine.”

“I will.”

“Tasha will take good care of you.”

“I’m not six. I’m eighty-nine.”

“It’s important for you to have some stability, though.”

“And I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”

Looking at Steve’s shield hurts Bucky’s eyes, like it glints with its own personal sun. Sam and Steve are off to help Fury with something, someplace far away. They haven’t told him, and he’s not sure if they don’t trust him or if they just simply didn’t tell him. They’ve stayed there in the house, hovering, for four long weeks, and now they are going to help Fury with something, and they hope to be home soon.

And until then, Natasha will hover in their place. She smiles tightly at him, and she sleeps with an arsenal in her bed.

 

 

 


End file.
